Tuesday, May 29, 2012

California Governor Jerry Brown was
famously dubbed ‘Governor Moonbeam’ for his half-hearted futurism, and an
apparent willingness to sail against the prevailing political winds (though in
actuality he was more likely to ride the waves generated by grassroots environmentalist
or labour rights movements).If his
claim to possessing any political courage, and the extent to which he earned
the ‘Moonbeam’ sobriquet were always open to question, the 2010 Jerry Brown
model is decidedly passé.

He resembles nothing so much as a
drowning man, frantically grabbing onto anything that floats his way without
pausing to consider whether the object in question is sufficiently buoyant to
take him (and incidentally California) to safer waters.You’d be tempted to throw him a life
preserver, but you’d hesitate, for such is his proclivity for getting things
wrong that you suspect you’d only be prolonging the inevitable.

First Brown latched onto the morally and
intellectually bankrupt notion of the political pledge, the very thing which
has transformed California’s Republican Party from a responsible participant in
state politics into a nihilist cult.In
this iteration, Brown pledged not to raise taxes without resorting to the
initiative process—the other feature of our politics which, in its present
form, makes the state ungovernable.Then,
failing to recognise the Republican Party for the anti-tax monstrosity that it
has become, Brown politely asked them to support putting a tax measure on the
ballot, and spent the next several months negotiating with a group of
pledge-taking, oath-swearing economic fundamentalists, with predictable results.

In the meantime, the Governor forced a ruthless,
anti-social budget on the state, which continued the carve-up of our world-renowned
public universities, our social system and our public spaces.As
George Skelton recently pointed out, Brown’s decision to close 70 state
parks was purely a gesture.Shuttering
the parks will not contribute so much as one penny on the dollar to closing the
deficit, and will have serious consequences for the communities which depend on
said parks for their livelihood.In the
long term, small, individual financial sacrifices which fund our health,
welfare and education systems pay big, collective social and economic
dividends.But this is too sophisticated
an argument for the Governor.

Sinking deeper, Brown launched a signature-gathering
drive to put a measure on the ballot for the fall of 2012.But the measure consists of temporary tax
increases to relieve our beleaguered state.There will be no mention of reforming Proposition 13—either with an end
towards ending the incongruity of minority rule which requires a supermajority
to raise revenues and a minority to shred our social system, or with an end to
rationalising our property tax regime, which in its current iteration treats
real estate moguls, large corporations, and Jane and Joe citizen alike.There will be no effort to institute a
rational voting system which gives voters actual choice (unlike Proposition 14,
which in this year’s election will present voters with neoconservative
Democrats like Feinstein, brainless budget-cutters like Brown, and assorted zealots
from the Republican Party, and no progressive alternatives).There will be no move to overhaul the
initiative process, or to fully integrate it into state politics.

In his campaign against billionaire Meg
Whitman in 2010, Brown once said “the process is the plan”.This was derided as a typical Brown-ism, but
in one sense he was correct.So broken
is California’s political system that any large-scale economic or social plan
is doomed to fall apart in the face of the state’s mangled democratic apparatus
(unless, of course, that plan is to dismantle the state’s institutions, for the
structure is tailor-made to implement such a right-wing agenda).But Brown’s grasp of the process, and specifically
of the need to reform the process, has proved spectacularly poor, almost
unbelievably so, in fact, for someone who has spent decades in state politics.This is all the more galling because Brown
made his understanding of state politics his primarily selling point during the
2010 election.So steadfast has he
proven in his unwillingness to address the faulty machinery of California’s
political system that one can only conclude that the Governor is possessed by
laziness and driven by political expediency rather than any real desire to come
to grips with the forces that first paralysed, and are now propelling our
state’s public sector inexorably towards self-immolation.

Like his predecessors, Brown is substituting
the artful deployment of smoke and mirrors for either a principled stand for
the progressive agenda his party once espoused or the kind of rational reform
of California’s politics which would both empower progressives in the state and
introduce an element of reason into our politics from which we could all
benefit.The Governor has been, from day
one, obsessed about the budget process, the dysfunctionality of which is merely
a symptom of the deeper problems which plague our state.In the context of minority rule, fiddling
with the budget, as Brown has chosen to do, can only cause more pain for more
Californians.

The Governor is a wily politician, whose
entire career has been based on the premise that governance by an unholy
combination of inaction and short-term expediency will enable him to survive to
fight another election another day.I
suspect, however, that the 2014 election will be his last, and the one during
which he will be unable to evade facing up to his legacy.Between his airheaded approach to state
government in the ‘70s which brought us Proposition 13, and his casual dismantling
of our education, research, parks, welfare and healthcare sectors in the ‘10s,
Brown will be responsible more than anyone else in the state for implementing our
descent into a state of anarchy presided over by the state Republican Party and
its wealthy paymasters.

As things stand, there is nothing
remotely forward-thinking, courageous, progressive, or even rational about the
Governor’s approach to our plight.Moonbeam
appears to have swerved out of orbit and lost contact with reality on his home
planet of California.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

I just ran across an article written by
a UC Irvine professor which describes an e-mail sent by the University of
California Office of the President to the university community, warning UC
personnel to avoid 1 May events—for their safety.You can read
Professor Jon Wiener’s piece here.The
substance (if it can be dignified as such) of the e-mail was that any members
of the UC community who stumbled upon an Occupy Wall Street event were in
danger of losing life or limb (Wiener points out that an earlier alert had been
issued in conjunction with the Fukushima meltdown, showing just how safely
removed from reality UC’s administrative leadership is).

As quoted by Wiener, the e-mail urged
recipients to “Avoid all demonstrations as a precaution”, and to take care
around “cities with a large immigrant population and strong labor groups”.Gee, that’s interesting.In the world inhabited by UC’s managerial
elites, the very sectors of society which bolster our university’s idealism and
give some credibility to its claims towards social and economic diversity pose
a threat to the safety of our community members.

This, of course, is laughable to anyone
at Berkeley or Davis who has been on the receiving end of police rubber
bullets, baton charges, or pepper spray.Breathtakingly idiotic e-mails from UCOP, Yudof, and the campus
chancellors (Berkeley’s Robert Birgeneau’s blithering gems take pride of place
in this pantheon of pea-brainedness) are nothing new.But it’s baffling how these people again and
again undercut their credibility by missing the point about the political
nature of the threat to higher education.Our cause is, to a very large degree, that of the Occupy movement.The fact that both could state their case
with greater clarity and cohesion should be no obstacle to our finding common
cause.

Dated by a month though it is, the UCOP
message remains relevant, and is perhaps most insulting inasmuch as it is a
further demonstration, if such were needed, of the extent to which UC
leadership is impervious to experience and immune to even the most elementary
teachings of those two savants, Cause and Effect.UCOP is effectively declaiming the usefulness
of the expression of political dissatisfaction.In so doing it is asking us to content ourselves with its own pathetic
efforts at advocacy, which have recently been converted into a full-scale
effort towards privatisation.It is a
ringing endorsement of apathy and a clarion call to unconscionable
silence.

Wiener’s final quote from the e-mail is
illuminating: “Maintain a low profile by avoiding demonstration areas [...and
avoid] discussions of the issues at hand”.What a truly wretched injunction to our beleaguered community.At a time when we need inspired leadership
and activism alongside impassioned commitment and discussion, UC leadership is
doing its best to neuter the system’s approach to its plight.This is just one more example of how the
head-in-the-sand, apolitical approach to the threat posed by massive state
disinvestment isn’t only not working, but actively seeks to hamstring more
thoughtful, realistic and committed efforts to address the problems facing the
University of California.

The cadre of administrators who have
wormed their way into system wide and campus administrations are either
reprehensibly out of touch or else actively working to stymie efforts to
preserve UC’s public character.The
future of UC depends not on the political passivity that they endorse, but
rather on critically engaging those interests and forces which are eroding our
ability to fund and care for the public institutions which are engines of political
change, social innovation, and economic equity in our state.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Vintage Brown: wielding
Aristotle against a testy Chamber of Commerce crowd, California’s Governor
promised, “The second [act] is when the tension, the protagonist is under
pressure, can he get out of the box he’s in.That’s always in Act Two.All
right, you wait.We’re going to get to
Act Three very soon”.

Oh boy.I can’t wait.Because so far, tension
and pressure barely begin to describe my feelings at Brown’s laceration of our
public sphere.If the Governor had spent
half the time he invests in procuring tangential references in planning a tax
measure in 2010, or had embraced the kind of political reform that would
introduce an element of reason to our politics, the state might be in a better
place.As it is, I really don’t
understand the Governor, whose determination to savage schools, universities,
and care for the most economically marginal in the state isn’t in the least
checked by the knowledge that he’ll be dismantling the generations’ worth of
work that was required for the construction of California’s public sphere—our society,
no less.

There’s something almost Oedipal (there’s
a classical reference for the Governor to chew on in his spare time) about
Brown’s buzz-saw wielding, given his father’s centrality to creating California
as the vibrant, civic-minded, future-oriented society as it still exists in the
mind of many people around the world.

Those of us who are disappointed with
Brown will face a dilemma of principle when we cast our votes in November.On the one hand, the Governor’s tax measure
is both socially and imaginatively stunted, grossly inadequate to the task of
mending Californians’ decades-in-the-making series of acts of spectacular
self-mutilation.It also comprises the
kind of quick-fix that might do one of two contradictory things (neither of
them boding well for the state): a) kill off the possibility of any such
emergency measures in the future once people realise how sorry of a band-aid it
is; b) encourage future governors to resort to ballot-box budgeting with the
same blatancy that has characterised Brown’s buck-passage.

On the other hand, if the measure were
to fail, Brown is promising to inflict an even more vicious punishment upon
those without the votes, the economic means, the social capital, or the
political wherewithal to defend themselves against death by a thousand cuts.Our universities and schools would be further
battered, and support for the sick, the elderly, the young and those who have
been cast aside by our already Spartan social services will be further diminished.So the Governor has sceptics trapped between
the knowledge that a vote for the budget will encourage future gubernatorial
hostage-takers, and the promise of the spectacular social violence that the
oath-taking, pledge-signing corporate lackeys in the Republican Party are
promising to commit.

So when I hold my nose and vote for his
measure, it will not really be a choice—our political market is just as ‘free’
as our financial one.As always, the
party prepared to abdicate responsibility and to commit indiscriminate aggression
against our society wins...in the short term at least.

What budget sceptics have to hope is
that Brown’s temporary measure will buy time for the Democratic Party,
progressive interests, and that segment of the state’s business population
which is not bent on joining the Republican Party in signing its social suicide
pact combine to push a more rational version of reform.

LA
Times columnist George Skelton and his
colleague at the Sacramento Bee, Dan
Walters (I hear that there’s a vacancy at the helm of California’s newest
political joke, the Moderate Party, and Walters and Skelton would be the
perfect ticket), are two critics of Brown’s short-termism. But Skelton’s
valid criticism (that the state is overly dependent on volatile upper-end
incomes, and should begin fiddling with Prop 13) is marred by his tendency to
swerve into self-parody.

Sure, I think that Brown opted for this
particular tax cocktail because it promised to sell well in the polls.But that doesn’t mean that the wealthy
shouldn’t be paying a greater share—whether in income, property, or business
taxes.Skelton takes a typically
simple-minded approach to the state’s dilemma, and concludes that Brown had
better get his kicks at the rich in quickly, “before they flee the state”.Skelton on Brown is a bit redundant: his
favourite phrase, one which he repeats over and over and over again, is “soak
the rich”.This is how he characterises
Brown’s tax measure, this is how he caricatures progressive politics, and this
is how he defines any move to distribute access to wealth and resources more
equitably.

Before he and others continue whining
about the impending exodus of over-taxed Californians, they should find some
serious evidence to demonstrate that it is high taxes per se that are driving
people out.Because I suspect that our steadily
declining schools, our ever more pricey universities, and our generally
diminished public sphere might have something to do with people looking beyond
California’s borders to rediscover a quality of life which is increasingly
being lost.

Our political process is apparently all
Greek to the Governor...at least that’s the conclusion I have to draw from his
fumbling efforts.But the high caste of political
columnists should develop a more reasoned critique of the Governor’s budget, one
which doesn’t insist on cutting basic services and putting more and more of the
burden on the vulnerable while those at the top are still exploiting loopholes
and taking home sums that are far more than necessary to live a decent life.

Skelton is right to focus on the details
of tax policy: broadening the base and lowering the burden is a method of
executing policy.But tax policy, like
other elements of our politics, should be required to adhere to a moral
framework, and that framework should prioritise the well-being of the many
above the profit of the few.Meaning
that we should not allow ourselves to be held captive by the threat of an exodus
of financiers or wealthy businesspeople.We’ve long been held hostage by wealthy interests, and now our own Governor
is playing the same game with California’s public sphere.What we need is to rework our political
structure to make it function along more rational and democratic lines.But it looks like we’ll have to wait until
after November.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

After Kampala, Lusaka feels like a ghost town, the
orderly, tree-lined, manicured streets comparatively devoid of people and, more
happily, of the chaos that characterises Uganda’s capital.Lusaka resembles nothing so much as a series
of suburbs without a city.Neighbourhoods in town bear a resemblance to what I imagine many an
Orange County suburb would look like if nobody did any maintenance for several
years.

And in California, we might be on the verge of
discovering for ourselves what happens when we endorse long-term and systematic
neglect of our infrastructure, our public sector, and our social provisions.Because as things stand, the combination of
the state’s bizarre supermajority requirements, the mangled tax structure, and the
public indifference has completely inhibited our ability to plan for the long
term, to envision any kind of investment in institutions which promote social welfare,
or to even have a meaningful conversation about our state’s priorities.

Faced with a formidable budget deficit, the
democratic deficit which results from our structural political dysfunction
mandates round after round of cuts.The
political rhetoric of the Republican Party, which is assuming the character of
a fundamentalist, oath-taking, pledge-signing cult, has persuaded a growing
number of Californians that being “against taxes” is a rational philosophical
stance.It is this incredible stupidity
which explains the willingness of lower- and middle-income Californians to vote
against tax measures.More often than
not, these measures are focussed primarily on the wealthy, and would result in
a higher educational standard, more affordable universities, and better social
services all around—all things from which the lower- and middle-classes stand
to benefit considerably given their inability to resort to the private sector
which services the needs of the affluent.

The conversation surrounding high speed rail is a
perfect example of the bizarre manner of thinking that has possessed our
politics.It has come to revolve almost
entirely around the short-term bottom line, with no consideration given to the
long-term benefits of reducing road and air traffic or to the revitalisation it
could bring to parts of the state.It is
an illustration of the extent to which our government and society quite
literally no longer have the capacity to undertake large-scale projects of
either an infrastructural or social character.

By now, even Democrats in California have largely
resigned themselves to cuts—cuts which are falling heavily on medical and
social services for the poor, accessibility of public spaces, the provision of early childhood education, California
Community Colleges, California State Universities, and the University of
California campuses, and which will shortly be hitting K-12 education
state-wide.Instead of taking aim at
Proposition 13, the 1978 initiative behind the state’s gridlock, Jerry Brown is
using exactly the same kinds of short-term fixes he told us he’d be too savvy
to resort to.In so doing he is
steadfastly ignoring the democratic deficit.He is legitimising the very process which plagues our state, and getting
himself off the hook by telling people that austerity is the only path.

The band-aid approach and the gradual erosion of our
public sector will perhaps soften the blow that is coming from
disinvestment.But sooner or later our
already-creaky social framework will exhibit signs of rot and neglect where not
outright dismantlement.As the
conditions in and rigour of schools decline, as our universities serve ever
smaller and continuously more exclusive segments of our population, as the
evisceration of social services leads to even more obscene levels of inequality,
our society will grow more dangerously polarised.

The greed and lack of collective responsibility
which increasingly characterises our approach to politics will spawn a society
in which people have even less in common with one another and therefore less
reason to look kindly upon collective investments which bear universal fruits
which lead in turn to widespread social and economic uplift.We’re kidding ourselves if we pretend that
we’re not on the long-term road to some kind of social ruin.

Because it’s no coincidence that there are people
benefiting from the political misrule that seems to have Sacramento in its iron
grip.The situation is not by any means
anarchic, although that might be the state which best describes the budgetary
politics which have in recent years usurped political morality as the benchmark
for rationalising economic policy.Rather, it is one directed towards the welfare of particular social and
economic interests: the people who can afford the neglect of public schools
thanks to their ability to send their children off to private schools; the
people who benefit from corporate loopholes or the state’s refusal to tax oil
companies; the people who decline to pay their employees decent wages or take
the welfare of those employees into consideration when designing their business
plans.This is not, whatever the
Republican Party tells us, about the well-being of Jane and Joe Public.

The fact that a small but influential number of people
benefit from the chaos in California gives the lie to the Republican Party’s attempt
to elide the interests of their corporate handlers with the public good.Rand Paul, one of the up-and-coming leaders
of the lunatic brigade in the Republican Party, once declared: “There are no
rich, there are no poor, there are no middle class.We are all interconnected in the
economy”.Aside from being a sterling
example of the breathtaking stupidity which characterises the Party in the
twenty-first century, this remark is illustrative of the thinking which
beguiles people into acting against their interest.Of course, we’re all interconnected.But we’re connected in the sense that there
are people who benefit from others’ misfortunes.We’re linked inasmuch as there are people who
suffer needlessly when others gain all out of proportion to their need.

It is the nature of this interconnection which we
need to understand and think about.We
should be wary indeed of allowing the persistence of a structure of government
which mandates cuts to the services which sustain the quality of life of a
majority of our people.We should expect
more of our political leadership than that they condone greed and implement
socially-destructive cuts simply because the alternatives would require more
thought and risk on their part.

California is heading for the rocks, in a more serious
way that most of us have dared contemplate.Jerry Brown’s current charade is insulting and dangerous, as is the
general pretence that we can continue to disinvest without feeling serious
consequences.We need political
leadership that shows some spine and some responsibility, and which doesn’t
continually pass the buck to voters.And
we need citizens who think beyond the next pay check, and who don’t shrink from
the task of imagining and sustaining a fair society which prizes the
realisation of equality over admiring the successes of a few from afar.We all need to step up to the challenge, and
to do so soon, before we begin living the consequences more fully.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.